“To lunch at the Blue Tea Room?” she cried. “Why, Mr. Bromley, so am I! That’s just where I was going. Isn’t that _queer_? Why, we can have lunch together.” The hopeful gleam passed out of Mr. Bromley’s expression, though perhaps the bright eyes looking up at him so eagerly were able to interpret his gloom as merely the thoughtfulness habitual to a scholar. His was not a practical mind; he had no thought that Cornelia’s lunching with him might have any result save to spoil the cozy hour he had planned for himself with his book as a table companion. To him she was one of the hundred pupils at the school—a little girl who had lately developed odd mannerisms and airy affectations, for no reason except that many little girls seemed to pass through such phases—and so far as his interest in her as an individual human being was concerned, Cornelia might as well have been eight years old as sixteen. He saw nothing, except that he would have to listen to her instead of reading his book, for, since she meant to lunch at the Blue Tea Room, she would probably talk to him anyhow, whether they sat at the same table or not. “Ah—if such be the case, very well,” he said, without enthusiasm. “Very well, Miss Cromwell.” Then he added hastily, “I mean to say”—and paused hoping to think of something that might avoid the proposed tête-à-tête; but he failed. “I mean to say—ah—if you wish, Miss Cromwell.” “_Do_ I!” she exclaimed, breathlessly; but the radiant face she showed him only gave him the idea that she was probably excited by the prospect of waffles. Yet, when waffles—the Blue Tea Room’s specialty—were placed, as a second course, upon the small blue-and-white painted table between her and Mr. Bromley, Cornelia showed no avidity for them. She had resumed her elegant manner, and but toyed with the food. Her elegance, indeed, was almost oppressive to her companion;—she told the blue-aproned waitress, whose cultivation was betokened by horn-rimmed spectacles, that forgetting to bring butter was a “dreadful baw.” She said “baw” as frequently as she could, in fact; and she appeared to view the people at the other tables through a frigid though invisible lorgnette. Her disdain of them as plebeians, beings unknown and not to be known, was visible in her expression;—so much so that it made Mr. Bromley uncomfortable; and here was a small miracle in its way; for in reality she did not see the other people in the room at all distinctly. They were only blurred planes of far-away colour to her; she was but dimly aware of their outlines, and failed to recognize two of them whom she knew very well.